Is You Okay? (5 page)

I moved to Los Angeles when I was thirty-one years old. A lot had changed—in my world, in
the
world—in the twenty years since I'd given up on becoming the tooth fairy, but one thing that remained the same was the basic definition of an entertainer I'd developed from watching Carol Burnett and Johnny Carson.

If you wanted to perform for a lot of people and make them happy, you needed a TV show. But what kind of show? A variety show like Carol Burnett's? Those didn't really exist anymore (they only recently started coming back with Neil Patrick Harris and Jimmy Fallon's version of
The Tonight Show
). A talk show? Those were all older white men who'd been around for decades. I could do a sitcom—in fact, a lot of the shows I loved as a teenager and then in college were sitcoms starring stand-up comics: Red Foxx in
Sanford & Son;
Ellen DeGeneres in
Ellen;
Robin Williams in
Mork & Mindy;
Roseanne Barr in
Roseanne;
Brett Butler in
Grace Under Fire;
Jerry Seinfeld in
Seinfeld
.

In interviews, the way all these stars described getting a show was pretty straightforward: they performed at all the great comedy clubs around the country for a few years, building an act and a persona, until the right someone saw them do their thing and told them they should have their own show. For most of them, the right someone was usually one of two people: talk-show host Johnny Carson, and his talent coordinator, Jim McCawley. Jim would scout all the comedy clubs in Los Angeles looking for the next big thing, and if he liked you, you got your shot on
The Tonight Show
. If Johnny Carson liked you, if he gave you the “OK” sign or waved you over to the couch, you got your shot to be a star in Hollywood with your own show. Johnny was gone by the time I got to Los Angeles, but Jay Leno was the host then and he was a great stand-up comic too. If he could do it, and these other comics could do it, I thought, so could I.

There was only one problem, at least if you were to ask anyone whom I asked for advice at the time: most people who want to do stand-up comedy start in their early twenties. Some start even younger. Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Eddie Murphy—they all started when they were
teenagers
. I was late to the game. I was too old to just be starting.

I didn't care. From 2003 to 2006, well into my early thirties, I started doing stand-up every night. I didn't make any money at the beginning, but that's not really the point when you're first starting out. The goal isn't to get rich, it's to get noticed.

And even more important for me, doing comedy was a way to make people happy—to do for the audience what Carol Burnett did for me. Obviously, doing stand-up didn't result in a TV show of my own, but that didn't matter because I never lost sight of my early, simpler dreams, and I didn't allow tunnel vision to wall me in. Instead, I let myself get pulled in other directions when opportunities presented themselves; opportunities that would never have happened if I didn't give my all to stand-up comedy.

Looking back on it now, it's a minor miracle I stuck with it and survived that period in one piece. Not only had I just moved twenty-five hundred miles across three time zones, but I went from a house near Disneyworld—the “Most Magical Place on Earth”—to an apartment in the Valley next to a freeway and a strip mall with a Goodwill in it. Technically, I was in L.A., but not the L.A. they now show on
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
. It was more like the L.A. they show on gritty cop shows. You know how people sometimes talk about being from “the other side of the tracks”? That's where I lived. I was on the other side of the Hollywood Hills (where all the rich and famous people lived), away from all the famous
comedy clubs and all the fun, exciting stuff. I was on the wrong side of the “makin' it” tracks, or so I thought.

Fortunately, striving and surviving out of my comfort zone like that prepared me for the moment I stumbled onto YouTube in my midthirties.

YouTube was still pretty young, then, but pretty quickly it was filling up with really young people posting videos and starting channels. Y'all grew up with most of this technology; it was second nature to you. I, on the other hand, had to learn it from the ground up. What if I had let my lack of technical ability, and the fact that I was fifteen to twenty years older than most of the people on YouTube, stop me from making videos? Imagine where I might be right now?

It works in the other direction too. What if Mark Zuckerberg let himself believe he was too young to start a company based on the website he built when he was twenty years old? What if Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber decided to wait until they were a little older to start recording albums or going on tour? Justin was discovered on YouTube when he was thirteen years old. The guy who discovered him, Scooter Braun, was only twenty-seven years old himself. Today, nobody tells them they're not old enough to do the things they want to do. And if somebody does, my guess is they don't listen too closely. Personally, I think people should stop asking kids what they
want to do when they grow up and start asking them, “What do you want to do
now
?”

The point isn't that you have to find something to be really good at, or that you need to have a huge dream. The point is: it's never too early or too late to figure it out. The key is to focus on what is in front of you and live your life in the present so you can take advantage of any opportunity that might come your way.

I have MaDear to thank for that. Not only did she change my outlook on growing up, but the same year I turned forty, when she was ninety-seven . . . ish, was the year she finally stopped cooking. Can you believe that? She was still going strong behind the stove, cooking and cleaning, doing her thing, well into her nineties.

That could be you too, with whatever you decide you want to do, whenever you decide to start doing it. But you gotta do it.

     
Q:
  If you were trapped on an island, what five things would you take with you?

     
A:
  A boat for sure. Some electricity, plenty of food, and I would need Wi-Fi, and my phone. Nobody's trapping me on an island. And if they try, they sure as heck aren't going to prevent me from posting videos.

Here's a truth I've found to be . . . well . . . true: this world is a funny place.

One minute this world can give you everything you've ever wanted, the next minute it can take it all away, and the whole time it's giving you every excuse you could ever need to take
the easy road, or just plain quit. When something gets hard—even something you really love—isn't it so easy to just pull the covers over your head, curl up in a nice warm ball, and tell whoever is listening that you're not going to school today, or work, or the gym, or your friend's house, or that party everyone has been talking about?

Doing
something
is always harder than doing nothing. Giving up, or quitting, is the easiest thing in the world, because it doesn't actually require you to do anything.

I've had so many opportunities in my life to quit, I've lost count at this point. When I broke my leg, for instance, I could have stayed laid up on my couch for months and done nothing while my ankle healed. No one would have blamed me. For a start, the doctor said I couldn't put any weight on the leg, and if I
had
to go somewhere, it would have to be in a wheelchair. That's such a pain! He was pretty much giving me permission to sit there and do nothing for as long as it took.

There was a part of me that wanted to take him up on his offer. It's always easier to let things get in your way. But I didn't let the wheelchair and the broken leg stop me; I would not give in to that part of myself. And of all the people in my life, I have one person to thank for that—my father, Ozell. He never made excuses; he never quit or gave in. No matter what
happened to him, he always lived up to his obligations and did what needed to be done.

Ozell Green grew up very poor.

Being one of eight kids, he didn't get a lot of attention from his parents. His father worked long hours and his mother, MaDear, was busy either cleaning houses for extra money, or trying to keep eight kids clothed and fed, so there wasn't a lot of time for individual affection. Sure, his mother birthed him, and sure, his parents gave him a place to live, but beyond that, they didn't do much of anything for him growing up.

Not that he ever told me that. My father didn't like to talk about those early days—I think he would have been worried it sounded like complaining, and if there was one thing my father never did, it was complain. Instead, I heard about his struggles from other people.

One of my aunts loved to tell about the time MaDear took my father to the grocery store and he made the mistake of asking for a cookie. He was little—I'm not sure he was even old enough to read—but he saw this delicious cookie at the checkout counter and asked if he could have it. MaDear didn't say no; in fact, she didn't say
anything
. She just spanked
him. He should have known better than to ask for such an expensive treat.

The cookie cost five cents.

When it wasn't old family stories that gave me some insight into my dad, I would connect the dots myself. For example, when I asked him why he became a pharmacist, he told me about Dr. Palmer.

Dr. Palmer lived across the street from the family when my dad was in high school. As the neighborhood pharmacist—this was before every CVS, Walmart, Walgreens, Costco, and Burger King had a pharmacy in it (okay, maybe not Burger King)—Dr. Palmer was an important man in the community, and he saw potential in my dad. What it was he saw exactly my dad never really knew, but one day Dr. Palmer stopped my father on the sidewalk on his way to school and offered him a job.

“Say, Ozell, why don't you come deliver packages for me?” Dr. Palmer said, like it was the conclusion to a conversation they'd never had. They'd never spoken much at all, in fact—in all their years as neighbors they'd only exchanged the normal hellos. The most my dad ever said to him at one time was “How are you today, sir?”

This was the first time in his life he had ever been singled out this way, and it made him feel very proud. He jumped at the chance and swore he'd never let Dr. Palmer down. Soon, he became one of Dr. Palmer's most reliable employees. He made every delivery on time, he almost never screwed up or missed a day of work, and if he did, he always made it right, no questions asked.

Eventually, Dr. Palmer started encouraging my dad to go to college—something no one in his family had ever done or even considered. “Go to school for pharmacy,” Dr. Palmer said, “and by the time you've graduated, I'll be ready to retire and you can take over the pharmacy for me.”

Here's this poor, ignored boy given special attention by a respected businessman, giving him an amazing chance to change his future. That's like insane
Annie
-type stuff, right?

There was only one little problem: How on earth was my dad going to pay for college? Dr. Palmer was a wonderful man, but he wasn't Daddy Warbucks. And this was the 1960s—college is expensive enough these days, but at least now there are scholarships and student loans to make it a tiny bit more affordable. If my dad was going to get his education, he was going to have to work to pay for it.

But he wasn't worried. He had a plan—a
ten-year plan
. He'd work half the year, use that money to pay for the next
semester of school, then take off the following six months to make more money to go back to school the semester after that. It was one semester on, one semester off, until he finished.

I don't know if there are too many people who would do something like this today—and I don't just mean my dad. I mean my mom, too. She married my dad while he was still in school, working at the pharmacy, and he also had a job as a waiter. She was still a schoolteacher then (she retired when we came along), so you'd assume she had enough sense not to do something so foolish, but I guess at her school they didn't teach you that it's crazy to believe some guy with a plan like my dad's!

A couple years later the plan fell apart. Mr. Palmer passed away suddenly while my dad closed in on the end of his education. Mrs. Palmer, fully aware of her husband's plans, nevertheless decided
not
to give the business to my dad. They had a niece who was getting ready to go to pharmacy school herself, and Mrs. Palmer wanted to keep the business in the family. My dad was really hurt by her decision, but there wasn't much he could do about it. He had no
right
to the business, and it wasn't like there were any legal papers. He had two options: quit to work full-time as a waiter or finish pharmacy school and . . . and then what?

What was he going to do now with all that education?
He
had no idea, but my mom did. She told him that Orlando was a big city, and that our neighborhood could handle a second pharmacy. There was plenty of room for everyone. Smart man that he was, my dad took my mom's advice and opened his own shop. (As luck would have it, he never had to worry about competition from Dr. Palmer's niece. She never actually went to pharmacy school, and Dr. Palmer's business eventually folded.)

I thought a lot about that period of my dad's life while I recuperated from my broken leg. What would I have done in my dad's position? What would you do? What
could
you do? What could anyone do? With a new wife, the easy thing would have been to quit school and work full-time to support his family. I think that's what a lot of people would have chosen. It wouldn't have been the wrong choice—it's brave in its own way. It just would have meant giving up on his dream and on his plan.

If I wasn't Ozell Green's daughter, that might have been my choice if I were in his shoes. Then again, those were a tough pair of shoes to fill. I don't just mean that as a figure of speech either.

Once, my sister and I were looking at old photos from our father's childhood and in one of them he pointed to his feet and said, “Those were the only pair of shoes I ever owned as a boy.” He told us how he squished his feet into the same pair of cheap, small, ill-fitting shoes for years and years, from the time he was very young all the way up into high school.

When you grow up poor, your parents can't afford to buy you new clothes and new shoes all the time, so when they do, they have to buy them a couple sizes bigger to give you room to grow into them. MaDear did that for my dad, but she did it pretty early on (he can't remember which grade), and then only once. The problem wasn't that his feet grew too long, like Cinderella's stepsister trying to jam her foot into the glass slipper. If that had been the case, he could have always just cut the toes and the heels of the shoe to make room. No—the problem was that his feet grew too wide. You can only cut the sides of shoes so much before they fall apart, so my dad was forced to endure the constant pressure against his feet as they tried to squeeze their way out.

The result was a tragedy.

Years later, not only were his feet completely messed up, but the shoes had cut off the circulation to his legs so severely that, right around the time I was getting ready to go to
college to study musical theater, doctors determined they had to amputate.

His right leg was in worse condition, so they took that one first. In case he took a turn for the worse during the recovery process, I decided to stay in town and go to community college instead of moving two hours away to attend the University of Florida like we'd originally planned. In typical Dad fashion, he handled rehabilitation like a champ, so the following year I made the move up to Gainesville, where the university is located. It wasn't long into the school year, however, when doctors realized they had to amputate the other leg and I moved home for his next recovery. Over the course of about eighteen months, the strongest man I knew lost both of his legs at the knee. How insane and sad is that?

And when folks asked him how he'd lost his legs, his answer was heartbreaking.

“Shoes, man, shoes,” my dad would say.